


O Death

by Ajaxthegreat



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: A LOT of violence, Again, Explicit Sexual Content, In later chapters - Freeform, M/M, Wild West AU, a lot of metaphors and coyotes, and dirt, and gay pining and southern gothic rivers, and guns, homoeroticism in nature
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2019-02-15 04:31:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13023279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ajaxthegreat/pseuds/Ajaxthegreat
Summary: He came into Providence the same way he would go out: in a coffin.Or, a two-timing, no-good, card shark mercenary and a tall stoic cowboy assassin walk into a bar.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was a LABOR to write, but i had a blast. i watched a lot of westerns, y'all. i feel like i have dirt in my hair.  
> The hugest of thank yous to my incredible artist, MADEOFPLASMA. God you guys. I just. I can't even tell you how incredible Soyouz is but you'll see for yourself soon. (http://madeofplasma.tumblr.com)  
> Another enormous thank you to El, who is seriously the best friend i could ever have asked for, and who betad this for me.  
> This chapter is short, the others will be longer.

_Now what is this that I can’t see_

_With ice cold hands taking hold of me_

_O Death, O Death, O Death_

_The children prayed_

_The preacher preached_

_Time and mercy are out of your reach_

**_-Ralph Stanley, O Death_ **

 

                                                      

 

_**HUX** _

He came into Providence the same way he would go out: in a coffin.

With the law on him it seemed the easiest way to come in quiet, and he knew the coffin maker from way back, when he'd given him a lot of business.

All in all the plan was good, except that he'd had to shoot his horse.

It had rained five days and a night, when a lightning strike had hit her and she'd gone blind, and it had rained a day after.

He couldn't shoot her in the rain; it didn't feel right. He sat in the mud all day with her, mud caking his boots, his fingers, the barrel of his gun. His feet felt forty pounds and his gun heavier than that.

He looked at his horse for a long time when the rain stopped, said nothing. Then he put his gun between her blind eyes and shot her.

It took two days on foot to find the place he'd meet the coffin maker, and when he did his feet were so covered in mud he could hardly stand.

The shop was small and sat crooked on a long stretch of naked red earth, and Providence was a mile south. The smell bothered the townsfolk.

The boy who took his hat and his gun took a look at the barrel and said, "You Hux?"

"You are not Doph."

The boy wiped his hands down his shirt and handed Hux back his gun.

"No, sir. He's in back, told me to look out for you."

Hux took out a cigarette but found his matchbox full of mud. He turned to the boy.

"Son, I am not a patient man."

Doph came in from the back then, hands dirty and sawdust in his hair. He was a man hardly taller than the boy and of a nervous disposition, but he was quiet and did good work and Hux liked him.

He lit Hux's cigarette for him and jerked his head, and the boy disappeared into the back.

Doph looked out the window.

"Where's Starkiller, Mr. Hux?"

Hux took a long drag and closed his eyes.

"Shot her."

"She go lame?"

"The good Lord-" and at this Hux spat on the floor - "saw fit to blind my girl while I's sleeping."

"I'm so very sorry, Mr. Hux. How did it happen?"

"I'm through talkin about this or any other topic with you, Mitaka," Hux said, squinting through his cigarette smoke.

Doph tipped his hat. "Apologies." He shifted uncomfortably, then leaned over the counter and lowered his voice. "I can get you to the saloon unseen, Mr. Hux, but once you get there -"

"Yeah."

"It's hard for a man like you to stay hid, is all."

Hux ran a hand through his hair. "Yeah."

Doph looked over his shoulder and said, "And if I do this you'll -"

"You point and I shoot, Doph. Service ain't changed." Hux got his hat from the counter and put his gun back at his hip before he said, "Now show me my pine box, boy."

 

 

_**REN** _

Ren spread his hand out on the table and finished his whiskey.

"Gentlemen," he said around a cigarette, pulling in cards and cash, "now you're just _givin_ ' your money away."

The man across from him lunged like a dog but Ren's gun was already in his face. He looked through his cards and cocked the hammer.

"Now there, Wil, I don't think that's wise."

The man's face was red and he said, "That'll be Mr. Tarkin to you, you no good four-flusher piece of-"

"Oh _Mr. Tarkin,_ I've not cheated in my life except on a woman once and I don't aim to start directly." Ren waved over another glass of whiskey, winked at the waitress, and sat back with his gun still on Tarkin's face.

"Let's be civilized gentlemen about this, yeah?"

Tarkin bared his teeth at the gun and said, "I bet you don't even know how to use that, you lyin' little shit."

Ren shot the glass out of Tarkin's hand, then he holstered his gun, threw up a poker chip, drew and shot it before it hit the ground.

"You were sayin', sir?"

The man next to him put a hand on the barrel of his gun and said, "You took all their money, Kylo, let's not start on their lives."

Ren holstered his gun, but it didn't set anyone at ease. He smiled around his cigarette and got up, tipping his hat.

"Gentlemen," he said, then turned to the man next to him, who had spoken. "Sheriff Dameron."

The Sheriff nodded, also angling to leave. "Kylo."

Ren walked back to the bar, gathered his money and his hat and reached for his whiskey when he found himself staring down the barrel of Tarkin's gun. He looked at Tarkin under his hat and said in a low voice, "Wil, I do not think this wise."

"Don't you tell me what's wise."

The bartender already had a shotgun pointed at them and at this, she cocked it. The bar went silent.

"Boys, I think it's best you took this outside."

Tarkin took one look at the expression on her face and went back to the card table with his pistol still on Ren, muttering under his breath about dangerous women.

Ren never drew his gun, but his fingers hovered over it as he said, "Miss Phasma, darlin, I don't plan on going anywhere."

The bartender shot high, out the window. The glass shattered and someone screamed.

"Do _not_ call me 'darlin' again."

Ren tipped his hat. "Apologies, ma'am."

It was at that time that a tall, imposing figure in a long dark coat walked through the doorway, and all eyes followed him to the bar.

Behind him, Ren heard Tarkin say something about getting the sheriff, but Dameron had already headed home.

The tall man kept his hat on when he spoke to the bartender, which seemed to scandalize the waitress. He spoke low and soft and it raised the hairs on the back of Ren's neck.

Ren rested his hand on the gun at his hip.

"Whiskey please, ma'am," said the man. His voice was gentle and yet Ren thought inexorably of dead things.

Phasma met Ren's eyes and then looked briefly at Tarkin before turning to the whiskey.

Ren turned to look, and saw that Tarkin's face had gone white.

Without turning around and still without removing his hat, the tall man spoke again.

"Mr. Tarkin," he said softly to his whiskey glass, his back to the room, "you look like somebody just walked over your grave."

And then without turning around, he looked into the mirror over the bar. Ren realized just soon enough to duck behind a table as the tall man pointed his gun behind himself - still without turning around- and shot Tarkin in the head.

After that it was hard to pin whose bullets were whose.

Two men took fire to the arm and one to the leg, and seventeen bottles of liquor lost their lives, but Tarkin was the only man to die.

The din slowed until it was just Ren, standing over a groaning body and pointing his pistol at the tall man, who pointed his right back.

"Been countin'?" asked the tall man. He was about the same height as Ren.

"Yessir, I have."

"You feel good about this, boy?"

"I never feel good about killing," Ren said, deadly serious.

Both men pulled the trigger at the same time, and both were met with empty clicks.

Sheriff Dameron chose that moment to come through the door with his gun out, and the tall man pistol whipped him. The sheriff dropped like a stone.

Ren holstered his weapon.

"He alive?"

The man looked over where the sheriff lay on the ground and sniffed. "Yeah."

His accent was harsh, like he was from someplace dry. Ren took a step forward. "Better be. Sheriff's a good man."

The man grinned under his hat and Ren felt a sweeping, all-over chill. The man said, "I ain't."

His fist connected with Ren's jaw before Ren even registered that he’d moved closer, and he reeled so far backward he nearly fell out the door. The bartender was busy loading her shotgun. No one else in the saloon seemed keen on joining in, so Ren squared his shoulders and started throwing punches.

After a few minutes the tall man was bleeding from his (red _red_ ) mouth and his hat was tilted sideways, and Ren was grinning like he hadn't in near ten years.

"I hope you know," said the tall man as he aimed a kick to the center of Ren's chest, "I aim to kill you."

Ren winked and dodged a punch.

"Thank the good lord for that, sir."

"Hux," said the man as he picked up a chair. "If I'm gonna be taking your life, you might could call me by my name." He broke the chair across Ren's shoulders and they both fell through the doors into the street.

“Well, Hux,” said Ren through a smile he couldn’t seem to smother, “my life is mine, and I’ll have a bit of a hard time giving it up.” He threw a vicious punch to Hux’s ear and connected, knocked the hat off Hux’s head and saw that his hair was bright orange.

Hux pushed his hair out of his face and grinned with a mouth so full of blood Ren could hardly see his teeth. It sent a chill through Ren all the way to his toes, before he took a punch to the kidney that lit up his whole body like a fire.

Ren was bleeding from his mouth and some teeth were loose. The night was suffocating and starless, and after Hux landed two more to Ren’s jaw, it started to fade away. Everything was soft and fuzzy when Ren put his hands back up, and before either man could move, Ren pitched backwards and landed his head on the steps of the saloon, and saw no more.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.
> 
> -WILLIAM FAULKNER, _The Sound and the Fury_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So now we are getting to actual chapter length chapters. sorry the first one was so short. this one is much more normal. check out the AMAZING art for this chapter that Soyouz did at the bottom.

**HUX**

When he woke, it was covered in mud. So much of it that he thought at first he’d been paralyzed, as he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He looked over at the man he’d been fighting the night before – dark hair he had, that man, and that was all Hux would let himself think – and saw him with his head at the wrong angle lying face-up on the saloon steps.

Hux tried to move his arms again and they were so heavy with mud that he couldn’t, so he said in a low, tired voice to the dark-haired man, “You done broke my neck.”

The man groaned, rolled over and vomited, and then sat up. There was blood on the back of his neck, and on his face and his knuckles when he touched the sides of his head as if to account all his parts were still there. He looked at Hux through glassy, half-concussed eyes.

“I didn’t aim to break your neck,” he said in a slow, drawling accent that made Hux think of somewhere green and soft. Georgia, maybe. “I aimed to kill you.”

Hux huffed, and looked back up at the sky. He tried to make a fist, and found that he could. With more difficulty than he cared to admit he lifted an arm.

The man spat blood into the dirt.

“See?” he said, wiping his mouth, “your neck is not broken after all, Mr. Hux.” Hux hated the beautiful way the man’s voice lilted, like a rolling hill.

“Hux,” Hux said sharply, sitting up too fast. He nearly vomited, too. “Just Hux. Where’s my gun?”

The man looked around him in a circle, mud an inch thick on his shirtsleeves. “Mr. Hux is your father, is he?” he asked in a sly tone of voice that implied he knew exactly how Hux felt about his father.

“Shut your fool mouth, child,” Hux said. The dark-haired man was getting to his feet like an old horse, slowly and with obvious pain.

“Ren,” he said after a grunt as he righted himself. “Kylo Ren. And I reckon we’re about the same age, you and I.”

“Ren, you and I ain’t the same anything.”

Ren smiled and Hux knew right then how good a liar the man was. Gambler, maybe. Smuggler. Too good in a fight to be anything else.

“Well, we’ll see about that, _Mr_. Hux.”

He picked up something huge and red and Hux thought it was a rock before he realized it was his gun, covered in mud. Ren handed it to him and Hux wiped it off and took aim at Ren's face.

Ren grinned, which pulled Hux's stomach. Hux narrowed his eyes.

"I don't think I gotta tell you I know how to use this," he said.

"You most certainly do not," said Ren, still grinning. His eyes were nearly as dark as his hair. "But you could, if being threatening so pleases you." He winked.

Hux pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

"Powder's wet," said Ren with a smug look. He shook the mud off his boot. "Rained last night, though I'm not sure we noticed."

His tone was wrong, sly and low like he and Hux had shared a secret together. Hux hated him.

The cocking of a shotgun pulled both men's attention to the road, where Sheriff Dameron had one pointed at Hux. His deputy, Hux assumed, stood at his side with a pistol pointed at Ren.

"Gentlemen," said the sheriff, "You are under arrest for the murder of Wilhuff Tarkin."

Ren opened his mouth with his hands up and the sheriff cut him off and said, "Yes, Kylo, both of you. You got 15 witnesses say you were involved. I'm bringing you both in." He turned to the deputy. "Finn, cuff em."

Hux said nothing, did nothing. His gun was choked useless and impotent with mud, and he was outnumbered. He let himself be cuffed and watched Ren do the same.

The walk to the jailhouse was long and hot and public. People peered through their windows to watch them, their slow shuffling walk made worse by the thirty pounds of mud on their feet. Hux spat on the ground.

"Public goddamn spectacle," he said, almost to himself.

Ren laughed. There was something about the way he held himself, even fight-stiff as he was, that made him seem relaxed - as if everything was going exactly as he wanted it.

Hux missed his horse. He looked sideways at Ren and rattled the cuffs around his wrists. Ren looked over at him with a lazy smile still on his face.

Hux said, "I'm gonna kill you, boy."

"Sheriff might just beat you to it," said Ren. His tone made it sound like he was talking about a card game.

Hux was concussed, and so he was dizzy and sick, and so in spite of himself he talked.

"Long way from Georgia," he ventured, looking to Ren for a reaction.

Ren raised his eyebrows. "That it is, sir." He didn't push any further for a few minutes. A hound dog howled from the front porch of the apothecary, and it was the only sound for miles. Hux flinched in spite of himself. The place set him on edge.

Something lifted from Ren's face like a revelation.

"You're from Providence, aren’t you?"

"Ain't from nowhere," Hux said automatically. "Nowhere."

"Difficult, you are," Ren said. His hands were fiddling with the cuffs.

Hux hesitated. The dog howled again and it startled the answer out of him.

"I was born here," he said as quiet as he could.

"You're gonna die here, you know."

Hux didn't reply except to spit in the dirt again. Ren's hands were still on his cuffs, making tiny unconscious movements.

The sun was hot, and Hux had lost his hat. He remembered that Ren had hit him so hard it had gone off somewhere, into a dark corner of the bar.

Finally Hux said, "First, I'm gonna kill you."

Ren laughed again, and there was something frightening in it. Never in his life had Hux been so unnerved by a gambler like Ren, but there was something in his eyes that Hux knew. The deep, bone-scratched carvings of lives taken, etched into Ren’s face as clear as the scar over his eye. Ren had killed, and he’d killed indiscriminately, and he’d killed often.

The cigarette behind his ear and the soft-hills lilt of his voice couldn’t hide that fact. Hux smelled the blood on his hands the second he laid eyes on him.

“Say you kill me,” Ren said softly, voice conspiratorial and mocking, always mocking. “Who’d get you out of those cuffs there?”

Hux looked over at Ren’s fiddling hands and noticed that he was holding the cuffs to his wrists, unlocked. He focused on his face, trying to discern whether or not he was bluffing. He did his best to avoid the suffocatingly dark color of his eyes.

“You’re not a man to talk much, are you?” Ren asked, still smiling. The sheriff was in front of him and the deputy behind, but neither seemed to be close enough to hear.

Hux didn’t answer.

The air still hadn’t recovered from the rain, and so it smelled like the wet iron of the mud. The people were fidgety, restless, because the air smelled like blood and no one realized it, and so the women all fanned themselves and clenched their fists and the men spat into the dirt until their mouths were dry. They watched, but the streets were empty.

Hux felt their eyes on his back.

“Around this bend,” Ren murmured, voice low and horribly soft. It made the hairs on the back of Hux’s neck stand up, that voice.

They turned a corner and there were no windows on this side of the buildings, no witnesses. Ren winked at Hux and Hux’s stomach turned over.

“Hey, Sheriff,” Ren said, a slow, sly smile on his face.

The sheriff didn’t turn and didn’t slow down, but said, “Yes, Kylo.”

“Who’s your new deputy?”

“That’s Finn, Kylo.”

Ren’s voice got dark and squirming and Hux had the urge to clean out his ears. “How long he been here?”

The deputy said, “He’s right here, he can speak his own damn self.”

Ren grinned, and his steps slowed. He turned toward the deputy. “Well?”

The deputy put a hand on his hip and touched his pistol. Hux saw the red brick of his own pistol on the sheriff’s hip.

“Five months, give or take,” said the deputy.

Ren’s grin widened until Hux nearly took a step back at the look of it, and he stopped moving altogether. “And how long of that time have you been in love with the good sheriff, here?”

The deputy stopped. The sheriff stopped. Hux stopped.

“Kylo,” said the Sheriff, voice indiscernible, “I advise you to shut your fool mouth.”

The deputy narrowed his eyes. “I heard of you, Kylo,” he said.

Ren raised an eyebrow, still smiling, and his teeth glinted in the light of the sun. “Yeah?”

“Yessir.”

“What you heard?” Ren asked. Hux noticed Ren’s accent dropping, slurring into something less educated but no less musical.  

“Heard you’re a gambler. Heard you’re a smuggler, that you ain’t no good for this town.” The deputy spat into the dirt and said, “Heard you like to rile folks up.”

Ren bit his lip and Hux looked away. This whole thing was obscene, inappropriate.

“You heard that, did you?”

"I did."

"You think I'm riling you now?"

The deputy squared his shoulders. Hux was painfully aware of the buzz of a hundred flies on a dog carcass further down the alley, and of no other sound save for the men talking.

"I think you're trying."

"Thought I was succeeding, tell you the truth," said Ren, then he looked the deputy up and down in a slow, dark manner that made Hux want to shut his eyes and said, "Though maybe it's only the sheriff who can get a ... rise out of you. So to speak."

The deputy clenched his jaw and lunged for Ren with both hands, ignoring the sheriff's protest. Ren smiled a terrifying smile and had the gun off the deputy's hip in the blink of an eye. He cocked it and pointed it at the deputy's head.

"Deputy Finn, I suggest you freeze," he said.

Finn put his hands up, expression murderous.

The sheriff had his gun pointed at Ren but it shook in his hands.

"Kylo, put it down. You won't shoot him."

Ren looked the sheriff in the eye then, something in his eyes almost like a mask slipping off. The shadows in the alley got darker, and despite the heat Hux felt a chill.

Without speaking, the sheriff pushed the hammer back up his gun and held his hands in the air.

"Ten paces, both of you," said Ren. "Throw down your gun."

The sheriff threw his gun into the iron-smelling mud.

"And Mr. Hux's gun, also."

Hux looked sharply in Ren's direction, surprised, but didn't speak.

The sheriff scowled and threw Hux's gun alongside it. Hux leaned forward and picked it up, hands still cuffed.

"We're leaving now," Ren said in a low voice. "I suggest you do not follow us."

"Don't you ever come back here, Kylo Ren."

Ren winked, gun frighteningly steady in his hand. Hux noticed that he was covering him, almost unconsciously angling himself protectively in Hux's direction.

They got as far as the town limits before Hux breathed at all, and another few miles before he saw fit to speak.

“I imagine you think I owe you now.”

Ren turned, skin and hair still a red cake of mud, and laughed. Hux was following him over the dry dead crust of the earth without really realizing it.  

“I don’t think you owe me a thing, Mr. Hux,” he said, and Hux clenched his fist. _Mr. Hux_. “Though you could probably use to wash up, don’t you think?”

Hux blinked and felt mud on his eyelashes. Ren pointed west, into the red glare of the sun, and Hux smelled sage and dust and not much else. He saw nothing but sunlight, burning blue spots into his eyes.

"I ain't see nothin," said Hux, squinting into the blue spots. He was tired, and had begun to slip into the sort of bastardly, uneducated speech patterns usually reserved for whores and the inside of his own mind.

Ren's step faltered as if in surprise, but Hux couldn't make out his face after looking into the sun for so long. Finally, he spoke again.

"No," he said, a smile always in his voice, "But consider seeing with your other senses, Mr. Hux. Man can lose his wits in a sun this bright."

Hux was quiet for a moment as he turned his face into the wind. He smelled sage, dry dirt. Then the wind shifted direction and he smelled tall, weedy grass and the unmistakably green scent of fast, clean water.

He walked toward it, and Ren made a little pleased sound and followed him. Soon he heard it: like wind over grass, but deeper, infinitely more lovely. The kind of sound a man born and raised in the desert came to think of as holy.

Water. Deep, wide. Moving fast.

"Thank the good Lord," Ren said under his breath when they finally saw the river. Hux turned, wishing he hadn't lost his hat. He felt exposed without it, the skin on the back of his neck felt bare in a way that made him want to curl up into himself and hide. He didn’t want Ren to see the backs of his ears, the freckles on his neck.

"The good Lord ain't got nothin to do with it," Hux said, keeping his eyes off Ren’s face, the closest to gratitude he dared to come.

Ren nodded at him. His hair was clean in one spot, covered in red mud except behind his ears. It curled there, impossibly dark against his skin. Hux swallowed.

Ren was already sliding down the riverbank, one hand dug into the mud to stop himself falling. He moved stiffly, still. Once he slid down to the edge of the water he bent to take off his shoes, unlacing them with fingers still caked with mud. Hux didn’t even realize he was watching him until Ren turned and said, “You just gonna look, or you gonna get that mud off you?”

Hux grunted, feeling the sun warming his cheeks – yes, the sun, of course it must have been the sun, and _where was his damned hat_ \-  and slid down the bank of the river to the edge just as Ren had done.

His hands felt awful, swollen and itchy in that way specific to dehydration, cracked and dry with mud just like the rest of him. He could hardly untie his shoes.

Ren had managed to get his off, then his socks, and the sight of his bare, unmuddied feet - stark white against the red riverbank, so inexplicably _naked_ looking - shocked Hux so absolutely that he had to shut his eyes for a moment as if blinded.

Ren looked over at him, asked in a low, quiet voice, “You alright?”

Hux nodded, spat on the ground and continued to struggle with the laces on his shoes.

“Your knuckle’s broke,” said Ren, who had already taken off his muddy shirt. He knelt in front of Hux in the red clay, knees digging into the earth on either side of Hux’s shoes, bare, bare feet just barely touching the edge of the river. “It’ll be faster if I do it.”

Hux tried to say no but feared that if he opened his mouth something else would come out, like _please don’t_ , so he pressed his lips together and said nothing.

Ren bent down and carefully untied Hux’s shoelaces, hands muddy but much steadier than Hux’s had been. He hardly felt the dull, swollen throb of his broken knuckles as he watched Ren’s hands take off his shoes. His heart was beating unreasonably fast.

Ren looked up at him then, kneeling dirty and half naked on the riverbank at Hux’s feet, and Hux made the grave error of meeting his eyes.

This was Death, he was certain of it. Death had come for him here, on this riverbank, with the sun beating down impossibly hot on his shoulders and the river singing soft and green just out of reach. Ren’s eyes were awful, gave Hux the feeling of looking into a very deep, dark well. Hux felt himself suffocating.

“Reckon you can do the rest yourself,” Ren said, still looking at him with that horrible, unbreakable stare. He’d stopped grinning, cocksure attitude sliding off like a mask once they’d escaped the sheriff. His voice was too soft, like he was worried they would be overheard. Like they were doing something secret.

Hux looked down and saw that Ren had unlaced his shoes all the way down, had pulled them open but had made no further move to take them off, as if holding Hux’s feet in his hands was something that had to be avoided at all costs.

Hux cleared his throat and, after far too long a pause, said, “I got it.”

His voice was in disrepair, cracked like it had never been used before. He squinted over Ren’s shoulder at the river and noticed how deep it was. The water was so dark in the middle it looked black, and it was moving fast. Hux watched a red weed get swept downstream, swallowed by the river so fast he hardly ever saw it.

Ren stood up, pulled his undershirt over his head. The lines of mud on Ren’s naked back were so red they looked like blood, so that Hux wasn’t sure if he was injured or just dirty.

He threw his shirt into the mud of the riverbank, then waded forward with his pants still on, scrubbing at the mud on them with his hands. Hux breathed a sigh of relief when his bare feet disappeared under the black water.

He hurried to pull his shirt off, kept his eyes on the shirt, his own hands, the water. His shoes, coming off his feet. Then his socks. How strange and secret the air felt on the arches of his feet, how desperately he didn’t want Ren to see. He buried his feet in the mud, threw his shirt onto the bank and waded forward. He couldn’t just _stand_ there like that. He felt Ren’s eyes on him but refused to look in his direction.

The water wasn’t nearly as cold as he wanted it to be, and Hux realized the mistake he’d made when Ren suddenly ducked down in front of him and disappeared. He didn’t even leave a ripple; the current took all traces of him.

He hardly felt a flicker of panic before Ren surfaced again and Hux had the sudden impression of looking at something unspeakably dangerous. His hair was darker than Hux remembered, finally free of that cracked red cake of mud, and it was long. It lay flat and black and wet against his shoulders, like an oil spill. He shouldn’t have come here. With Ren. He shouldn’t have ever looked at him. He should stop looking at him now.

Ren turned, and the shell of his wet ear caught the sun so that Hux could see through it, thin and red and painfully delicate. His eyes were closed. Hux felt an awful, ashamed desire to _scream_ building in his chest.

 

Waist deep in the too-warm river, Hux let his feet kick out from under him and felt himself submerge. The water had a sound, some kind of constant, black roaring that could only be heard underneath. It hurt his ears, the _power_ of it. Hux had to dig his feet into the mud at the bottom to keep from being swept away.

To think this river looked so slow, so lazy from the surface.

He tried to focus on nothing but the rush of the water past his ears, how cold it was at the bottom by his feet and how warm it got closer to the surface. The sun - and, somehow, Ren - seemed deadly and distant from under the water, like an animal safely behind a cage.

He still felt the weight of Ren's eyes on him, even under water.

Never in his life had he seen eyes like Ren’s, never had he seen skin so pale and hair so dark, never in his life had he been so painfully, magnetically drawn to the knuckles of someone’s hands or the soft skin on the insides of his elbows. The space Ren took up, the lines of his torso, moved something so painful in Hux’s chest that it robbed him of his remaining air, of his will to swim to the surface. Never had he needed to look _so badly_ , as if he would die if he didn’t. He would die if he never looked at Ren again, and he would die if he did. It frightened him so much that he wanted the river to drown it. If the river drowned him in the process, then so be it. At least he would be free.

He would sink, float downstream to be washed up miles later, and he would finally be free of that terrible stare.

It seemed such a good idea that Hux actually opened his eyes – black, only black, not a speck of filtered sunlight and thank the Lord for it – and let go, relaxed his body and let the river sweep him up. His toes pulled free of the freezing mud and he felt himself being carried downstream, held down by the undercurrent. He couldn’t surface now; didn’t even know which way was up. There was a sharp stab of panic before he told himself that this was better. This was better than facing that dark hair, the skin over the tops of those scandalously naked feet.

If he had to face death, it would be this way. This, at least, did not frighten him.

Ren frightened him.

Hux had the instinctive urge to breathe, like a hiccup, and opened his mouth to breathe in the river without conscious thought when a hand – _strong_ , frighteningly strong – gripped him by the back of the neck and pulled him down toward the riverbed. He didn’t even fight it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily."  
> -Cormac McCarthy, _All The Pretty Horses_
> 
> Kylo Ren comes face to face with a past he thought was dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, guys, i'm an idiot and it turns out I was waiting on a thing that I didn't actually need till next chapter! So the next chapter will be up in a few days to make up for it.

##  REN

Hux had disappeared. He’d simply disappeared, like he’d never been there, like a dream. Ren paid it no mind at first, scrubbed the mud from the backs of his ears, from his hairline, from under his waistband.

But Hux did not surface.

Ren felt a strange lurching feeling in his chest, like an urge to vomit but stronger, and realized it was panic. He saw nothing. The water was black and fast and the sun was so bright on the top of it that it blinded him. Hux was gone. 

Ren squinted into the water, into the hundreds of little suns broken up on the surface, and caught sight of a pale green shape floating downstream, still and slow as a dead fish. He moved faster than he thought himself capable of, dove down and gripped Hux by the back of his neck and pulled him out before he realized what he was doing.  _ This shouldn’t matter.  _ None of it should have mattered. If Hux wanted to die, Ren should have let him die. He’d done it before, and worse.

But it did matter, so Ren wrapped his hand around the cold, unmoving back of Hux’s neck, put his other hand under Hux’s armpit and heaved him up into the air. He didn’t move. When his face broke the water, he didn’t breathe. He was still, his hair the color of old blood when it was wet, pushed back from his face.

Ren pulled him over to the bank of the river and pushed on his chest with both hands a few times, as he’d once seen his father do when he was a child - back before he’d killed him.

He pushed hard, then a bit less when he thought he felt something crack under his hands like a rib, and then did it again. And again.

Finally, Hux coughed up a spurt of brown water and his eyes flew open, pupils dilated to almost nothing. Whether it was from fear, or the too-bright sun, or from the blinding light of Death, Ren did not know.

With his pupils shrunk as they were Ren had never seen eyes so brilliantly blue, so  _ much  _ of them, the blue seemed to strangle the whole rest of Hux’s face. It was unnatural, almost. They were so bright they looked wrong, sick, like an acid lake. His eyelashes were clumped together with water and still orange. 

Hux took a deep, shuddering breath, shook his head and closed his eyes like he didn’t want Ren to see. Ren said nothing, just watched him breathe, watched the rise and fall of his chest with something so close to relief it frightened him. 

Finally, after kneeling over Hux and dripping water all over his chest in silence for too many minutes, Ren sat back. Hux lifted a hand – shaking, Ren noticed – and touched his chest. He looked at Ren and his eyes were no less blue than before. Ren was struck dumb by them.

“What did you do to me?” Hux asked, and there was something far too serious and deadly in his tone, as if he was asking the question about a hundred things at once. “What did you do?”

Ren found he was panting, though he didn’t know why. He wasn’t the one who’d stared death in the face and spat it back out again. He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes with one hand and said, “Saved your ungrateful life, you mean?”

Hux’s acid-lake eyes followed the movement of Ren’s hand for a brief moment before they flickered and closed, like he was trying to rid himself of something.

“I didn’t ask you to,” he said, and his voice was rough and low. Lower than Ren had ever heard it. It dragged in the dirt, reminded him again that Hux was born of the desert, somewhere unforgiving and hot.

“Hard to ask anything when you’re drownin’,” Ren said with half a smile.

Hux’s eyes lingered on the upturned corner of Ren’s mouth and Ren felt a dark, unspoken thing uncurl in his chest. His expression as he looked at Ren’s mouth was the most open, the most vulnerable thing Ren had ever seen on a man’s face. He looked like a starving coyote, staring at a carcass it knows is a trap.

Hux looked back up at him and his expression was already shutting back up, like a constricting vein.

“Should have let me be,” he said softly, spitting more black water onto the riverbank. “Should have just left it.”

Ren’s throat tightened inexplicably. “You wanted –”

Hux shot him a look that answered  _ yes _ without speaking again. Ren looked away, suddenly ashamed without understanding why. 

The thing living in Hux’s eyes passed, as if a cloud had moved from in front of them, and he, too, looked suddenly ashamed.

“I don’t – ” He started to speak, then cut himself off. His hair was beautiful against his ears. His skin looked so white it glowed where the sun had missed it – under the freckled line of the shirt he wasn’t wearing now, over his temples. The freckles stopped so abruptly on his chest that Ren had to look away, as if the flushed pink of his nipples was infinitely more exposed this way.

Hux cleared his throat and looked at the ground, sitting up and rubbing at the place where Ren had pushed too hard on his chest.

“I don’t know why I – something took hold of me.”

Ren nodded without looking at him. Hux had never spoken so many words in all their time together.

“Seems strange now,” Hux said, and Ren understood he meant  _ I no longer want to die  _ and  _ thank you _ . He knew he wouldn’t say it. 

“Strange,” Ren repeated. Hux grunted, then put his hands on his knees and stood up. 

"Suppose that's clean enough," he said to the water, voice still rough. Ren stared. Hux's back was so white it hurt to look at it, strong in strange places, as if he did nothing but point guns and throw punches. 

Ren looked to the water as well, watched the slow, insidious way the current pulled at the weeds in one or two dark spots, like a secret. 

It was so black it scared him, and the blood and dirt had washed from Hux's face and hands. 

His back, though, still had a few smudges of red mud - perhaps from the riverbed. And the back of his neck, which he protected in a manner almost shy, was perfect and white save for a few painfully beautiful freckles and one stubborn streak of red earth. 

Ren had to clench his hands to stop from reaching out. 

"Clean enough," he echoed, turning his back on Hux and the river.

They put their shirts back on - clean, wet, Hux's clinging terribly to his skin in a way that made Ren keep squinting into the sun to get away - and Ren said to Hux, "Where will you go?"

He meant  _ Now that you and Death are closer acquainted _ but the look Hux gave told him he was thinking of the Sheriff. 

"Providence," Hux said with his hair pushed out of his eyes, drying fast in the red sun. "Job ain't done."

"They'll hang you," Ren said, as if it had been pulled out of him.  _ Leave it _ , he thought to himself.  _ Let him hang _ . But still, he said it. 

Hux looked over and met his eyes and Ren felt a sharp pull in his stomach, like fear but worse. 

"Job ain't done," he repeated, with his eyes on Ren. He moved like he wasn't used to walking so far - too fast, boots shuffling over the cracked earth too loudly. 

"Leave it," Ren said, urgency bleeding into his voice without his consent. "Whatever your job is, it's not -"

"It's a man," said Hux, and his voice fell dead and final like the hammer of a gun. "I kill him, and the job's done."

"Tarkin's dead, Hux."

Hux looked over at him again, sharp and animal, and Ren caught another glimpse of the starving coyote before Hux shuttered his expression again. Ren wondered why he'd shown it to him for a moment before -

He'd had called him Hux, had forgotten to taunt him with  _ Mister _ . 

It seemed unbearably personal, somehow. After the river.  _ Hux _ . As if just the sound of his name was too naked, too intimate a thing to place between them. It thrilled Ren all the way to the swollen pads of his fingers, itchy and dehydrated in the desert air. 

"Ain't Tarkin what was my main target," Hux said quietly, feet still carrying him towards Providence. Ren wondered why he was following him. Hux said, "Tarkin was a favor."

As if shooting a man between the eyes was the sort of thing passed around a dinner table. 

Ren couldn't help the curiosity in his voice when he asked, "Who's the target, then?"

Hux squinted into the distance, said nothing. A coyote howled, high and alone. 

Ren narrowed his eyes. "You owe me at least that much."

Hux spat into the dirt. “I don’t owe shit.” 

“Tell that to the black water.”

Hux paused. 

"Why you wanna know?" he asked.

Ren couldn't answer. He had no answer. Only that it seemed vital that he know. 

"Maybe I know him," Ren pressed. 

"Then you don't wanna know."

"Maybe he's an enemy of mine."

"Then you don't need to know."

Ren stopped, reached forward for Hux's arm. Hux's expression pulled into something vicious, hunted, when Ren touched him. 

"Hux," he said, and felt a fine tremor run through Hux's arm like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Something crossed Hux's face and Ren's heart froze solid in his chest before Hux even spoke.

"Man's name's Solo," Hux said very quickly, wrenching his arm out of Ren's grip. "Ben Solo."

The sun was low and so red it made everything glow, like the desert had slipped halfway into hell. 

Ren didn't move. His ears were ringing. 

"You know him?"

Ren's feet were fused to the red dirt. Hux was nearly ten paces in front of him now. He turned and Ren swore on his life that he would never set another rabbit trap as long as he lived. Nothing deserved this. 

"You know him?" Hux asked again, as if he'd simply not been heard the first time. 

Ren finally spoke, voice taking altogether too long to leave his throat. 

"No," he said, finally shaking his head and making his feet move. "No, I don't know him."

Hux looked at him a hair longer than necessary and Ren’s stomach turned over. Then he turned away, toward Providence again and said under his breath, “Strange man.”

Ren’s teeth were chattering. The ground was so hot it breathed, waves of air drifting off the rocks, and Ren’s teeth were chattering. His knuckles cracked before he realized the fist he was making.

He remembered, so long ago it felt like it happened to someone else (and it did, in a way), meeting the Mayor. Snoke, the man’s name was, but he always called himself the Mayor.

He remembered how he’d just killed his father, how the blood was scarcely washed off his hands, when the Mayor had found him two towns over - drowning himself in a bottle of whiskey that was older than he was.

He remembered how the Mayor had offered him a job – _ won’t you work for me, son  _ – and he remembered how he’d taken the Mayor’s money and disappeared. Changed his name, found a horse. Taken off with his pockets full of the Mayor’s stolen cash and poker chips. He remembered how he’d run into an old friend two years later just outside Yuma and she’d told him the exact words he’d been waiting to hear, the exact words he didn’t want to hear.

_ Mayor’s still lookin’ for you, Solo. _

Ren watched the back of Hux’s neck, already reddening in the evening sun, and made up his mind.

“Mr. Hux.”

Hux stopped, and at the tone of Ren’s voice had his hand on the gun at his hip. He turned and his hair was the same color as the setting sun, the same color as the clouds smeared low over the horizon.

“I lied, before,” Ren said, hoping to God Hux didn’t smell the lie on him now. “I know the man.”

Hux shifted his weight in a way that told Ren he’d knock him out cold if he threw a punch now. He waited, silent, for Ren to finish speaking.

“I hate him,” Ren said, and it was true. “He’s dead to me.”

Hux squinted into the setting sun and even at the distance of ten paces Ren could see how brilliant his eyes were. “He ain’t dead to me,” Hux said, voice still rough from the river water. “Not yet.”

Ren took a step toward Hux and Hux angled one shoulder back, squaring up for a fight.

“I can take you to him,” Ren said, and everything hinged on this now. Everything. 

Hux looked at him and behind them, the sun was so red it made everything look like it was burning: the dust, Hux’s hair, the freckles in his eyes. A coyote howled. Night was coming. 

"You can," Hux said, less a question and more a disbelieving statement. 

Ren nodded once. Everything in him hummed, a hair away from screaming. The sun sank lower by the second. 

After a time Hux said, "Fine," and Ren had to stop his knees giving out. "Show me."

Ren had to buy time, so he nodded his head at the hazy flat outline of Providence and said in a voice that didn't shake at all, "He's not there."

Hux spat on the ground. "I heard -"

"I don't care what you heard," Ren said. The sun had nearly disappeared; Ren could feel the orange heat of it sliding down his neck and off the edge of the earth. 

Hux squinted at him. His hair fell into his eyes in one place, soft and orange, and Ren regretted that he'd eventually have to shoot him. 

"He ain't there?"

Ren shook his head. He pointed to the mountains in the distance, to the right: less mountains and more square red rocks, in a long straight line. Flat on the top. 

"That way," he said. 

Hux spat again. "Over it?"

"Over it."

Again, Hux looked at him, and Ren did his best not to let his betrayal show on his face. 

He remembered a cave on the close side of the mountain, back from when he was young and had just killed his father. He'd been in hiding, still Ben Solo then - a dirty-faced kid with hands that shook and eyes that gave everything away. 

The ones who had helped him kill his father were older men who worked for Snoke - one huge, shadowy entity called the Knights - and they wouldn't let Ben lie. They tracked him across the desert, unrelenting as Death, and so he fled into the red jut of the mountains. 

In the cave, shivering and tearing into the flesh of a barely-cooked jackrabbit, Ben Solo had carved the name of every Knight he knew. Then he'd cut himself with the bones of the jackrabbit's feet and crossed out each one in blood. 

And one by one, he'd hunted them all down and sent them to Perdition. 

All except one. 

The last one, the one who's hidden from Ren the longest. The one Ren was about to set Hux on like a rabid hunting dog. 

"Solo's on the far side," Ren said. "Heard he holed himself in a cave there."

Hux stopped and stepped close to Ren then, suspicion in every line of his dirt-stained face. 

"Heard from who?"

"Din - uh, Navajo," Ren said, and it was true. 

"Reliable?"

"Old friend."

Hux nodded, then peered at the mountain again. 

"I hear the Navajo don't touch this mountain," Hux said, voice softer. "Hear it's the fingers of a god."

"Teeth," Ren corrected. "It's his teeth." He looked at the pointed rock face, the unnaturally straight lines the rock formed in. "You don't step inside God's mouth, Mr. Hux."

Hux started walking toward the mountain, making an aborted movement toward his head - adjusting the hat he'd lost - that Ren was realizing was something of a tick of his. He sat on the ground at a dead sage bush a few feet away, and started a fire. 

"God's mouth," he said under his breath, looking around for kindling. "Ain't never killed a man inside a god before."

Ren shrugged, looking up at the looming rock face. 

"First time for everything," he said, and a chill ran from his spine down to the soles of his feet. He felt a shiver of shame in his chest, and couldn't look at the mountain anymore.

He looked at Hux, sat down on the ground next to him and helped stoke the fire. The sky was indigo, and so big it frightened Ren to look at it.

The sun finally sank under the flat ground behind them, the last lines of pink and orange disappearing with it, and Ren shivered as the desert cold set in. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."   
> -Flannery O'Connor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SOYOUZ DID THE MOST AMAZING ART FOR THIS CHAPTER. that is all.

**HUX**

He was a quiet man, but he wasn't stupid. People often confused the two.

He knew Ren was hiding something. Now, with night pressing cold and black on them and only the fire between, he felt even more certain. Ren was hiding something.

Ren's preternaturally dark eyes would land on his face and then skitter off again, like rain off a roof, and Hux would sit still by the fire and wait for them to come back.

They did not speak for a time. Hux missed his horse.

The desert was brutally cold at night, and a strong wind came through and threatened to kill the fire. Ren moved closer, blocking the wind with his body and touching his shoulder to Hux's.

It was so cold, so deathly cold, the sort of dry freezing air that only lived in the desert at night when all the sun's heat had evaporated off the flat rocks like water. Ren's body heat was so close to him it was making him shake.

Hux stared so long into the fire without blinking that he felt tears on his face. His hands were balled into fists.

Ren spoke first.

"We ought to try for the mountain." He said something else too, something like _Get it over with_ , but it was so quiet Hux couldn't be sure.

Hux asked, "And leave the fire?" No. They would die if they left the fire.

Ren nodded. "The wind'll kill it and us, at this rate."

Hux looked over at the mountain, looming tall and black against the silver moonlit landscape.

"It won't kill us," he said.

"We got no blankets, no shelter, and no food," Ren said, voice hard. The way his voice traveled through the freezing air made it sound brittle, like it would shatter at any moment. "We should never have stopped here."

Hux ground his teeth but said nothing. He was born out of the desert, he'd known it was time to stop. He knew a man didn't walk about the desert at night.

The cold was one thing. The coyotes were another.

Ren was jittery. His hands were shaking and he still couldn't look Hux in the eye. "We should _move_ ," he said, urgent and low.

Hux looked at him and resisted the urge to back away. Ren's face was too close. The firelight made his eyes look like oil. Something twisted horribly in Hux's stomach, uncomfortably low.

"You afraid?" Hux asked, and at Ren's expression he knew this was what Ren had been trying to hide from him.

Ren didn't answer, but he didn't need to.

Hux turned back to the fire and put his hands in front of it.

"Right to be," Hux said, and as if it had been waiting for him to speak a coyote howled.

Ren seemed torn between insisting they look to the mountain of shelter and staying put. It took Hux a moment to work out the indecision on his face.

"Mountain scares you," he finally said. Ren looked into the fire and nodded, never meeting Hux's eyes.

So that was it. The jittery movements, the looks. The insistence that they go for the mountain _now_ , in the dead of night. Ren was afraid of it.

"We ain't movin'," Hux said quietly, nodding to the silver flat earth spread out behind them, "Not till that coyote does."

Again, as if it had been waiting, the coyote howled again. Closer this time. Ren jumped.

They sat in silence some more, stoking the fire. It was too cold to sleep. Finally, Ren said, "You say that funny."

Hux looked over silently.

"Coyote," Ren clarified, but over-pronounced it. He dragged it out, all the syllables Hux had used sounding off in his soft grass accent. Kai-oht.

Hux huffed in annoyance and didn't respond.

"It's a Kah-oh-tee."

Hux huffed again, and this time felt one corner of his mouth pull up. Ren grinned with half his face and rubbed his hands together in front of the fire.

"Got bullets?" Hux asked.

"Some." Ren blew on his hands. "You?"

"Just one." Hux took it out of his pocket, showed it to Ren. It was stamped with a strange symbol, a sun inside a sort of hexagon. "Been savin' it special for Mr. Solo."

Mister Snoke had given Hux the bullet - just one - and had told him that it was of a mighty emotional importance that he shoot Ben Solo with that bullet.

He'd paid him extra, so Hux didn't argue. Just put the bullet in a safe place and didn't take it out again.

Ren's face flickered with something that Hux almost wanted to call fear, and then he was grinning.

"Guess if that coyote comes for us I'll have to protect your sorry ass, huh?" Kah-oh-tee.

Hux desperately wished he had a cigarette.

The rest of the night passed in silence, though neither man slept a wink. Hux was so grateful to see the sun come up he actually sighed in relief.

They got moving as soon as it warmed enough to leave the fire, and they arrived at the mountain just past high noon. As was the way of the desert, it was so hot Hux had a hard time imagining how he'd ever been cold.

Ren had stopped at the rock face and was staring up at it with some unreadable expression. Hux stopped beside him.

"Teeth," said Ren quietly. His eyes were dark, glued to the caves littering the front of the mountainside.

"I'll take it from here," Hux said, strangely reluctant to see Ren go. Still, there was no reason for him to stay. He'd taken Hux this far and it was clear he feared the folklore of the mountain.

Ren looked at him. His hair was back from his face and it felt wrong, to see so much of it. His temples were white with dark freckles, like he was housing a galaxy.

"I'm coming with you, Mr. Hux."

Hux stared. He was too tired not to. Ren stared right back and something flared like a flame in the pit of Hux's stomach.

Ren said, "I need to see. For myself."

"You need to see Solo dead," Hux said, and Ren's eyes slid off his face and back to the red rock.

"I need to see him dead," he answered.

Hux didn't argue. He ignored the strange mix of dread and relief in his chest and spat on the ground. Ren's expression looked almost offended.

"Have some respect," he said, then looked away again. His feet still hadn't moved any closer to the mountain's face.

"Superstitious," Hux muttered under his breath, then stepped past Ren and laid his hand on the rock face.

It was cold, so cold it shocked him, and he nearly drew his hand away. It would warm with the sun, surely.

Ren spoke behind him, stepping closer, "It's always this cold," he said. He touched the mountain with a reverence that made something twist in Hux's rib cage. "Don't matter how hot the sun is."

Hux made sure his gun was safe at his hip and gripped the rock face with both hands.   
"We best get a move on, then," he said, and hauled himself up.

Ren followed silently, but not before Hux saw him press his forehead to the rock and mutter something under his breath.

The climb was long, and before long Hux's shirts were soaked through with sweat and his fingers were numb from the cold of the rock face.

He found the lowest cave first, and below him Ren's voice said, "We shouldn't stop," but he ignored it and pulled himself up over the edge. His forearms and fingers were screaming. If he climbed much further he would fall to his death and Ren knew it.

It was blessedly cool inside, and the high enough that Hux could see the wide expanse of flat red earth spread out under him when he looked out. Providence was just visible through the haze of dust, west of the river.

Ren hefted himself inside and straightened up, dusting off his hands.

"There's another cave deeper than this one maybe fifty more feet up," Ren said. "Better suited for shelter."

Hux was busy wiping the blood of popped blisters off his hands and didn't look up when he said, "Thought you said nobody touched this mountain."

Ren gave him a confused look. His hair was blown into his face and he squinted.

"You seem familiar with it," Hux elaborated.

"I ain't a Dine," Ren said, but something hitched in his voice.

"Dee-nay?"

"Dine. Means 'the people.' They don't say Navajo."

Hux looked up at the wall of the cave to find clear evidence of a person having been there - a pile of ash, the bones of something picked clean.

"They don't come up here, huh?"

Ren sniffed. "There are some exceptions."

Hux turned on him. His arms were shaking with fatigue and it was cold in the cave without the sun. He realized he had nothing to build a fire with.

"How the hell you know so much?"

Ren shrugged. It was clear he wouldn't answer. Hux found himself foolishly angry.

"You are hidin' somethin'," Hux said in a much lower voice than he intended, "I intend to find out what."

Ren's eyes snapped up to his face and Hux saw something cornered, furious, like an animal.   
"You don't know shit, Mr. Hux.”

Ren's eyes were on the cave walls. He looked over at Hux and spoke again.

"We rest, then we go."

Hux opened his mouth to protest and Ren said, "There's a cave higher up - it's deeper, it should have supplies."

Hux shut his mouth again, sat on the ground at the mouth of the cave and rubbed at his forearms. Ren sat beside him. He looked at Hux's arms.

"It's easier going after this," he said. "Less steep. More places to rest."

Hux narrowed his eyes at him. "How can you be so familiar with this place?"

Ren looked out. The great flat expanse of the desert stretched in front of them, long red lines of flat rock and the green twisting road of the river. Providence sat low and dusty in the distance, a haze over the town that made it nearly invisible.

Finally, Ren said, "I spent a lot of time traveling. This was a good place to hide."

Hux looked at him, surprised he'd spoken. Ren's eyes were on him, so dark. Deep. The kind of pool you step in and don't come out of.

There was something in Ren's expression, but it flickered away and Ren looked up at the ceiling of the cave. Hux shivered. He'd been covered in sweat and it was freezing now. He could hardly feel his hands.

Ren stood, held out a hand to Hux. He took it without thinking - he was exhausted.

A bolt of lightning struck Hux right in the chest, and he let go of Ren's hand as soon as he was upright. Ren’s skin was too warm, the palm of his hand felt too alive against Hux's.

Ren pointed to a narrow path out of the cave, up the cliff side.

"That way," he said, and then he went.

Hux followed him.

They climbed for more time than Hux thought himself capable of, though some of the cliffside was flatter here, like steps. Hux's fingers still shook. The wind was worse the higher they went, and Hux imagined himself being blown to the ground by the wrath of whatever god this was. He grabbed a red jut of rock and thought of teeth.

Ren was off to his left, surprisingly considerate of kicking dust into Hux's eyes. He didn't say a word for hours.

Finally, they hauled themselves into the mouth of another cave, and Hux felt the difference.

The air here was freezing, the warm wind from the desert just bouncing off. Hux turned and looked, mouth falling open.

The cave was enormous, went maybe 100 feet backwards inside the mountain, opened up into a sort of cavern further in. Ren was already there, smudging something written on the cave wall with his hand.

"What's that?" Hux asked.

Ren's hand shook. He shrugged.

"I don't rightly know. Can't seem to read it."

Hux walked over, squinted. "Looks like a list." His voice echoed in the cave.

Ren shrugged again and walked away, exploring the rest of the cave. He let out a short bark of laughter and Hux turned. He hasn't heard Ren make that sound in days - he'd forgotten how unsettling it was.

Ren pointed at a fire pit - a circle of stones around a pile of ash, with wood stacked neatly against one wall. Hux's legs nearly gave out in relief.

Ren sat in front of the pit, took some cheatgrass from somewhere inside his shirt, and started the fire.

"We're staying here for the night," he said. Hux nodded and walked back up to the mouth of the cave.

It was stunning, he had to admit that. His hands were shaking and his fingers were scraped and bloody, and he couldn't stop shivering, but it was stunning.

The sun was on its way to setting, sinking lower and lower over the desert, and the whole sky was stained orange from it. The light was the color of fire where it landed on the ground, long lines cut up by purple clouds, and they were so high up Hux almost felt he could see the curve of the earth.

Ren whooped behind him, and the sound echoed off the walls and made Hux jump. He turned.

"What."

Ren had gotten the fire started, was throwing wood onto it and Hux had to squint as the smoke was sucked past him out the mouth of the cave. He walked closer and saw Ren was pointing to a bottle.

Hux raised his eyebrows.

"Told you this cave was better," Ren said, and he grabbed the bottle and sat back down immediately, uncorking it with a mischievous look on his face.

Hux looked down at the small saddle bag he carried with him - smaller than the one he'd had before, and God how he missed his horse - and took out the bread he'd squirreled away there.

He passed some to Ren without thinking about it.

Ren took it with a strange expression on his face and passed him the bottle.

Hux took a drink, then nearly spat it back out.

"What is that?"

Ren shrugged. "Dunno," he said, grinning. He took another drink and made a face.

Hux settled down next to Ren, grateful for the fire and the bread and, begrudgingly, whatever poison they were drinking. It warmed him from inside.

When the food was gone - Ren had hidden some dried rabbit meat, and Hux had nearly had to wrestle half from him - they settled onto the ground, Hux full and finally warming thanks to the fire and the drink. He laid out on his coat, and Ren did the same. They kept a careful distance between them.

Ren had the bottle, and his words were even rounder than usual when he said, "Why are you doin' this?"

Hux held his arm out and Ren passed him the bottle. Whatever it was, it was making quick work of them. Hux's vision was blurry and Ren's eyes were red and heavy-lidded, and they'd barely drank half of it.

Hux took a long drink. His head spun. "Money," he said.

Ren looked at him a long time. The fire had a terrible effect on his eyes, and his hair was long and dark and unbearable against the skin of his neck.

"Liar," Ren said, but his accent was so slurred with drink it sounded more like _Lar_.

"Why are _you_?" Hux asked, urgently. It seemed so important that he know.

There it was again, that peculiar flicker of expression. Hiding something.

Ren sniffed and looked away, took another drink and dug around in his coat pockets.

He came out with a deck of cards, so dirty and old they hardly looked like anything, and his face lit up.

"You play, Mr. Hux?"

"You ain't answering my question."

"Win, and I will."

Hux reached out for the bottle and Ren handed it to him. It was beginning to taste pleasant, sweet and strange. Hux drank and then said, "Deal, then."

Ren grinned again and dealt the cards.

It was silent for a time while they looked and then Hux spoke, uncharacteristically cocky with drink.

"You know you gon' lose, right?"

Ren laughed. "Mr. Hux, are you aware that I once convinced a gypsy mind reader that -"

"I know what kinda card player you are, Ren."

Ren grinned again, drunk and loose and dangerous.

They played for some time, and without realizing it Hux finished nearly the whole bottle. Ren’s face was flushed and his hair was hanging in his eyes. He was looking at Hux with an expression that made Hux’s hands shake.

He was losing. Badly. Ren grinned again and won another hand.

“Your hands are shakin’, Mr. Hux.”

Hux scowled. His forearms seemed barely capable of holding the cards in his hands after the climb.

“Tired,” he said, and took another drink. Ren reached over and grabbed the bottle out of his hand. He’d gotten a good deal closer.

“You’ve had enough of that, I think.”

“Had enough of you,” Hux muttered, or at least he aimed to. It sounded more like a jumble of noise when it came out.

Ren laughed. His demeanor was so _loose_ , so easy, so predatory. He was every bit the gambler Hux had met in that Providence saloon. His hair was so dark it made Hux feel sick.

Ren drained the last of the bottle, then slumped onto the ground next to Hux and looked up at him. Hux hated the way his eyes looked. He stared at Ren on the ground for too long.

“You’re ‘fraid,” Hux said, softly. He slumped down as well, too tired to hold his spinning body up. He felt a thousand pounds.

Ren didn’t answer, just looked at him. They both laid on the ground, cards scattered in front of them. Ren’s eyes were darker than the mouth of the cave.

A coyote howled in the distance, across the flat expanse of desert, and Hux’s skin prickled.

“So’m I,” Hux found himself whispering.

Ren crawled over to the fire and propped himself up with some difficulty, watching Hux over the flames. His expression was about as sharp as it could be, drunk as he was.

Hux was falling asleep, sucked into it by the drink and the fire. He laid his head down and looked into the flames, easier than looking at Ren. Looking at Ren hurt his eyes.

“Hurts,” he said, voice so soft he wasn’t sure he was speaking aloud.

“What does?”

“Lookin’.”

Ren’s voice was unbearably intimate and close when he murmured, “Lookin’ at what?”

His voice echoed off the walls of the cave, bounced back a hundred times. Like Hux was drowning in him. He couldn’t get away. He found Ren’s eyes again without meaning to.

“At you.”

Ren took a deep breath, as if trying to steady himself. He kept his eyes on Hux, but Hux couldn’t look at him anymore.

Something pulled at Hux like a revelation.

“S’at what you’re afraid of, then? Lookin’?”

Ren was silent for a moment, then he cleared his throat. He didn’t seem able to speak.

Hux kept talking. He couldn’t help it.

“This mountain,” he said, voice quiet and low, “shows your worst fears. Don’t it.”

Ren said, softer than he’d ever spoken, “Yes.”

Hux nodded to himself.

“What’s it called?”

“Ilum.”

Hux opened his eyes with a colossal effort. “Ilum.”

Ren nodded. Hux looked at him, finally really looked. Ren looked back.

“That’s it,” Hux said softly. “That’s why no one comes here.”

Ren nodded again. “Yes.”

“Ilum gives you – ”

“Trials,” said Ren. “That’s the myth.”

“Ain’t no myth,” Hux murmured. “Ain’t no myth, you sittin’ there like that.”

Ren’s hands balled themselves into fists, shaking. Hux was sweating. He was so close to the fire.

“Like what?” Ren asked.

“Like – like that,” Hux answered, too drunk. “Lookin’ – ”

Ren’s gaze on him was hotter than the fire.

“Finish,” Ren said. “Finish.”

Hux sat up onto his elbows, looked Ren full in his beautiful face. And it was, he could admit that. It was beautiful. It didn’t feel real, holed up in this mythic mountain, full of alcohol. So dark and quiet outside the cave that the world hardly even existed. God’s mouth.  

“Too lovely,” Hux said, though it was so soft he wondered if Ren could hear. “Please. Close your eyes, I can’t look at ‘em.”

Ren didn't close his eyes, kept them on him all huge and dark and drunk, and they tore apart the inside of Hux's chest. He'd never felt so devastated just looking at something before.

"You're gonna be the death of me," Hux said, slurred. The wind howled outside.

Ren looked at the ground then, something like shame darkening his face. "I - I gotta tell you somethin'."

Hux was slumping bonelessly onto the ground, helpless to stop the pull of sleep. His eyes drooped. He wanted to be closer to Ren, but if he got any closer he'd die. Ren's proximity was warm and addicting and dangerous and deadly. Just like the fire.  

"I. I'm - Hux?"

Hux couldn't keep his eyes open anymore. The way Ren said his name settled into his skin, uncomfortably warm and intimate, as if he had pressed his bare hand to Hux's stomach. Hux murmured in a soft, broken-open voice, "Too lovely. Gonna kill me."

Then he fell asleep all at once, with Ren's eyes on him in the warm dark of the cave.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I guess you ought to be careful about cussin the dead. I would say at the least there probably ain't no luck in it.
> 
> Cormac McCarthy, _No Country for Old Men_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> finally.

The next morning, Ren woke with a hammer in his head and a mouth so dry it felt soft.

He was sprawled out on his back, next to the smoldering embers of the fire, and Hux still had yet to stir next to him.

He'd come so close the night before. He'd come dangerously close to telling him everything.

He'd been on edge since they found the cave, _his_ cave, the cave where Ben Solo had carved the names of each of the Knights, each of Snoke's men he was going to kill. He'd managed to smudge the names before Hux had seen it, but the proximity of it, the feeling of being back there, it had eaten at him all night.

And then - and then Hux had gotten drunk, drunk and loose and easier than Ren had ever seen him, hair soft and the same devastating, deadly orange as the fire. Then Hux had looked at him and _wanted_ , obviously, painfully. Horribly.

And Ren had nearly told him.

It was ready, right there on his tongue. _Ben Solo was me. I planned to kill you after you delivered Snoke the imposter. He is the last of the men who hunted me._

If Hux hadn't fallen asleep, so desperately vulnerable and open and right in front of him, Ren would have told him.

But he had, and Ren hadn't told him. Hux seemed under the impression that Ren's guilt and shame were not over his betrayal, but instead-

Instead over -

What had he said? _Lookin'._

Ren wanted to laugh. Looking at Hux was the one thing he _wasn't_ ashamed of.

Hux groaned next to him, the chill of the cave creeping in on them now that the fire was nearly out, and shivered. He turned and vomited onto the ground.

Ren laughed softly.

"Drink just about untied your shoelaces, did it, Mr. Hux?"

Hux groaned again. "M' fine."

"Uh-huh."

He sat up, orange colored hair sticking straight up in the back, and rubbed his hands over his face.

"What was that?" he asked, nodding at the empty bottle.

Ren shrugged. He knew exactly what it was, but it was an old and closely guarded recipe native to the indigenous people and felt almost sacrilegious to speak of.

"Sure as shit weren’t two-cent whiskey," Ren said, keeping his voice low. “We oughta get moving.”

Hux nodded, scratched over the brilliantly orange hair along his jaw and grimaced as he rolled to his feet.

The sun was near as lazy as they were. It crept over the flat horizon so slowly Ren wondered if he was still inebriated, if time was being stretched out somehow. The whole desert floor lit up red with a crawling, soft orange, falling on the town and the rocks and the dirt an inch at a time. The sky was cold and cloudless.

This was it. This was the day he’d see the last Knight sent to hell where he belonged.

He knew he was in a cave on the far side of Ilum, holed up waiting on a delivery for Snoke, but he had no idea which cave - and the far side of the mountain was even worse than the one they’d climbed already.

Ren took a long breath at the mouth of the cave and let it out over the godforsaken desert.

After this, he could finally go back to doing what he loved: drinking whiskey that wasn’t his and gambling money he didn’t have.

Only problem was he’d have to shoot Hux.

He didn’t expect to feel so opposed to the idea - he’d killed plenty in his time, so that he mostly felt a sort of detached pity, as one feels for a hunted animal that’s been inexpertly shot. He’d shot a man between the eyes at five paces without so much as blinking when he was hardly old enough to shave. Death was nothing new. He and Ren were old friends.

But the idea of shooting _Hux_ \- of the look on his face, the surprise and resignation, the way he would reach up to pull down the hat he’d long since lost - it turned Ren’s stomach.

Hux spoke then, pulled Ren head and shoulders out of his reverie in a voice still in disrepair from the drink: “You waitin’ for somethin’?”

It dragged, scraped against the bottom of the cave, echoed so that Ren had to hear it over and over again, had to think over and over again about what it would be like to make Hux’s voice sound like that if he -

“No,” Ren said aloud. “Let’s go.”

They climbed. It took near an hour to get to the top, and as soon as Ren swung himself up onto the flat top of the mountain the wind nearly knocked him back off again. He lay flat on his stomach, toes curling in his shoes as he looked down the rock face all the way to the ground. He held out a hand when Hux got close, and Hux took it.

Something twisted painfully in Ren’s stomach as he pulled Hux onto the mountaintop, flat like it had been cut that way, red and dry and freezing and windier than anything Ren had ever felt.

The top of Ilum was frightening, in the way all holy things were frightening.

It was huge, powerful, ancient and alive in a way that was impossible to explain, and offered a clearer view of the desert than anything else around it. There were a few smaller mountains in the distance, and a line of them to the south that shielded Providence from the wind Hux and Ren were being battered by now, but nothing stood up to Ilum itself.

Ren pressed his forehead to the flat rock and murmured a thanks to Ilum for not ending their lives, though he knew it was only half over.

The top of the mountain was hardly ten feet wide, and carried on straight across for miles like a walkway until it dropped off to join the shorter mountains on either side.

Ren would have led them to take a route through one of the shorter mountains if it had been possible, but they were solid sheer rock faces impossible for climbing. Ilum had been their only option.

The wind was so bad that Ren was afraid to sit up, let alone stand, and Hux seemed the same. He pulled himself carefully to sitting, looked behind him at the other side of the mountain, and hunched in on himself, blowing on his hands.

They rested for less than ten minutes before they shared a look – it was too windy to speak – and Ren swung a foot over the other side.

No sooner had he done that then the rock under his feet gave way and his whole weight dropped like a stone.

His heart stopped. He felt himself falling slowly, like a dream, and knew that it was over a thousand feet to the bottom if he fell unobstructed.

He wouldn’t, though. He’d hit his head on one of Ilum’s teeth, first, then perhaps his whole body would land on one of its jutting fingers and he’d be left to oblivion.

His foot was dangling uselessly in the air and he scrabbled for purchase on the hard rock of the mountaintop, but found nothing. This was it. Inches, _hours_ from his goal, this was it.

He supposed this was what he got for cracking so many jokes in his life. Death was playing one on him now.

A warm, calloused hand gripped him by the wrist half a second before he fell into nothing, and Ren’s whole world narrowed to the feeling of Hux’s hand on him.

His eyes, watering from the wind, found Hux’s, and nothing could have prepared him for the force of such a thing.

Hux was sitting on the mountaintop, legs spread wide to stop himself from falling, one hand wrapped unbreakingly around Ren’s wrist and the other thrown back behind himself. The wind made his hair look like a flame.

Ren finally found a safer place for his footing and tested his weight on it, then nodded at Hux _. I got it._

Hux let go, something burning in his expression.

This side of the mountain faced nothing but vast, flat, open expanse of desert, so the wind bit savagely at them the whole way down. It made Ren feel as if at any moment, the mountain could wrench them off its face and toss them to the ground like the insects they were.

Ren prayed. Feverishly. Relentlessly. With every halting step, every tenuous, shaking grip of rock and dirt. Every time his fingers found a crack that could have housed a scorpion, or a rattlesnake, or could have crumbled in his hands and left him to tumble uselessly into thin air, he prayed.

Hux was silent above him, though he could have been muttering to himself and Ren wouldn’t have heard it, wind such as it was.

After what felt like hours, Ren’s feet landed on a outcropping of rocks wide enough to stand on, leading down to the mouth of a cave. He waited for Hux and gripped his hand, put one hand on Hux’s back. Hux shivered and coughed to try to cover it up.

“Alright?” Ren asked, suddenly desperate to know.

Hux nodded, but didn’t speak. His cheeks were red from the wind, his eyes wet and bloodshot. He still looked painfully sharp and dangerous, beautiful like a bird of prey.

Ren shook himself and pointed.

“I think that’s where he – Solo – I think that’s where Solo is.”

Hux nodded, then set off toward the cave with one hand at his hip.

They stopped outside the mouth, and Hux took the bullet out of his pocket and loaded it into his gun. He squinted at Ren.

“You confirm it’s him first.”

Ren nodded, gut twisting again. “He may not be here. Could be in another cave.”

“I know.”

Hux moved, already inside the cave with the gun out by the time Ren had his guilt under control enough to register it.

He stepped inside the cave and the reprieve from the wind was enough to make him sigh in relief. He noticed nothing for a moment, save for how good it felt not to have the wind on his face, in his eyes. Then he noticed Hux, with his gun out straight in front of him, pointing it at the face of –

Ren’s hands balled themselves into fists before he could stop them, his whole body humming with hate.

The last Knight was near 40, grey hair at his temples, with a weathered face and small green eyes that Ren wanted to tear out with his fingers.

He remembered, then. He remembered everything. He remembered how the Knights had come to him, all on their horses, intimidating as any army. How they’d stopped him after church and told him of his _potential_ and his _talent_ and Snoke and all the things he could do. How they’d robbed hundreds of towns, trains, settlements. Killed hundreds, thousands of people. How easy it had been, riding around and just _taking_ like that. How they’d given him a man to shoot in the dead of night, how they’d said it was important to Snoke that he kill him, how it had turned out to be his father. The ring of the gunshot, the way his chest had come undone when he’d heard his father gurgle out his name.

This was it. This was the moment he’d spent years waiting for.

The last Knight’s eyes widened when they fell on Ren’s face, and before he could open his mouth Ren said, “That’s Ben Solo.”

The look of confusion melted into a look of grim, terrified understanding, and Ren said with a voice so full of violence it hardly sounded like it belonged to him, “Kill this son of a bitch, Hux.”

Hux cocked the hammer of his gun and said, “Mister Snoke sends his regards.”

“No, no –”

The gunshot stopped the man's sentence better than anything else could’ve, and then his body crumpled to the floor of the cave and it was silent, utterly silent.

It was faster, easier than Ren expected - the man was simply no longer breathing.  He crumpled to the floor like a marionette, so heavily and so easily that it almost seemed that he’d never been alive at all.

Hux stepped forward to inspect his body - the red, wet hole in his skull - and Ren bent to cover his tracks in the man’s belongings.

He found it quickly, hands shaking slightly as he pulled out a hand-engraved cigarette holder, the same one all Knights carried, engraved with the man’s real name.

Elijah Cook.

Ren ran his hand over the letters - so strange, to have a man’s death so consume his every waking moment and to not know his name -  and then glanced up to check that Hux was still occupied.

Hux was removing Cook’s head. His whole head, cutting it clean off his shoulders with a knife and preparing a pack to carry it in.

Ren knew he couldn’t let Snoke get his hands on that head - he’d be found out as soon as the man laid eyes on it. He felt another pang of regret, stronger than he would have liked, when he thought of how soon he’d have to kill Hux, but shook it off and turned back to Elijah Cook’s name.

Mentally, he added the name to his list and then crossed it off.

Ren’s own cigarette holder issued from Snoke was long gone, thrown into the river years ago, and so he could not switch the two, but he pocketed Elijah’s all the same.

Quietly he said, “Takin’ a man’s head on this mountain’s playing with fire, Hux.”

Hux turned. There was blood on the side of his neck, brilliant against his pale skin, and splattered across his knuckles when he pointed the knife at Ren.

“You oughta shut up, Ren.”

Hux’s eyes were blue as the bottom of a flame and there was something so alive, so indestructible in them in that moment it nearly struck Ren dumb.

Nearly.

“Why’s that?”

Hux turned away, placed Elijah’s severed head inside a pack he seemed to have brought for exactly that purpose. The set of his shoulders set Ren’s hair on end. His toes curled inside his shoes.

Without turning back Hux said, “Because I just done a job, and I’m not in the mood to be pushed.”

But his hands were bloody and steady when he stood, and the air around him shivered with something like _excitement_ and Ren wanted to take a step in the opposite direction, but he didn’t.

He stepped close to Hux’s back, closer than he ever had, nearly touched him and said in a low, low voice, “What if I wanna push?”

Hux didn’t turn, but he didn’t move either. He spoke to the wall of the cave, bloody hands balled into fists.

“Think hard before you act, Kylo Ren.”

Ren was dying, _burning_ to put his hands on him. His skin was crawling. He reached out and gripped Hux’s shoulder, turned him around and slammed him into the wall of the cave. Their shoes were inches from the decapitated corpse of Elijah Cook.

“I never think,” Ren said.

He tried something else, a test: “Hux.”

Hux flinched, a twitch of his fingers, and Ren knew - this was the push he was speaking about. This intimacy, this ability to strip someone bare with just the use of their name. This was what Hux was begging him not to do, and yet -

Ren stepped forward further, chest touching Hux’s chest. He couldn’t look away from him.

Hux was breathing hard, a flush over his cheeks, and Ren knew it was from shooting the man whose head was laying feet away from them on the floor of the cave, and he didn’t care.

In fact, it made something shockingly pleasant twist low in his stomach; a sort of warm, slow realization as if he’d always had one foot in hell and was just now noticing it.

Hux’s skin was burning hot when Ren laid his hand against the sharp angle of his bare collarbone, nearly unbearable. He tore his eyes off the flush spreading over the hollow of Hux’s throat and looked him in the face.

“I’m gonna ask you a question,” Ren said, voice low and more broken than he’d have liked.

Hux swallowed. Ren watched his throat work and then settled his eyes back on Hux’s mouth.

“When you killed this man with your own hand,” Ren said, tone almost obscene, “What did you feel?”

Hux looked Ren in the eyes, violence in every line of his face, and did not respond.

Ren said, “What do you feel now?”

When Hux spoke his voice was lower and rougher than Ren had ever heard it.

“Power.”

Ren leaned forward a fraction of an inch and lowered his voice to a whisper.

“Is that all?”

“No.”

Ren grinned and slid his hand up to hover over Hux’s throat, whole body tense and warm.

Hux spoke again, and the tone of his voice made Ren want to close his eyes.

“Let me ask you, Ren,” he said, “When you saw me kill this man with my own hand, what did you feel?”

Ren didn’t even blink. “Relief.”

“Is that all?”

“No.”

Hux smiled, a different smile than Ren had ever seen on his face – curved and sharp, utterly terrifying. Devastating. Ren felt his whole chest crumbling to ash.

“No,” Hux said, as if testing Ren’s answer. His eyes fell to Ren’s mouth deliberately, slowly, different than all the times before. He reached up and shoved Ren’s hand off his throat and then gripped the collar of Ren’s shirt in both hands.

Ren’s whole world was shifting. His feet seemed pulled out from under him, his head spun like he’d been kicked by a mule.

This wasn’t – he couldn’t –

He ought to shoot him _now,_ right now, before it got any worse, before this went any further –

He couldn’t touch him, not like this, not _him_ –

But when Hux’s sore knuckles cracked from the grip on Ren’s collar, when he pulled him closer than they’d ever been before, when he breathed fast and hard and excited across Ren’s face, he didn’t stop him. He didn’t shoot him.

Against all his better judgments, against everything he thought the mountain had been trying to teach him - he found himself looking down at the red, panting, irresistible set of Hux’s mouth.

And as soon as he wrenched his eyes back up again, Hux kissed him. Hard. Demanding. More terrible, more inescapable than Ren could have imagined. All thoughts of shooting Hux fell away, replaced with _fucking finally_ –

And just like that, Ren’s resolve snapped like a thread.

_You’ll regret this_ , he thought, digging his teeth viciously into Hux’s bottom lip, but he wasn’t sure if he was referring to Hux or to himself. _You’ll regret this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this took so long to update, guys. more is coming soon. let me know your thoughts, it helps me write. a LOT.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> nsfw

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we have arrived. i feel this should go without saying but please do not try this at home.  
> now with more truly amazing art from @madeofplasma.

 

This was what dying felt like.

No. This was what Hux _wanted_ dying to feel like – overwhelming, horrible, stiflingly warm. A tidal wave of inescapable power, a rush of adrenaline unlike anything he’d ever felt. It had to be dying, there was nothing else it could be –

Ren’s teeth dug into Hux’s lip and he found himself gasping, a wet, vulnerable sound that he’d never made in the presence of another person before.

Ben Solo’s headless corpse was inches from Hux’s feet, the blood all over the soles of his shoes, still sticky and warm and halfway to drying on Hux’s hands. He could feel it in droplets across his neck, his face. He’d never felt so exhilarated in his life.

Or so afraid.

He hated Ren suddenly, viciously, furious that he’d done this to him. His hands shook where they were wrapped up in Ren’s shirt.

“Hux,” Ren murmured, close against his mouth, and at the sound of his naked name in that voice Hux lost all control of himself and let his head fall back against the stone with a sigh.

“You ever been touched this way before?” Ren went on, hands hovering over the buttons of Hux’s shirt. He seemed frustratingly adept at reading Hux’s body language.

_Never_ , he wanted to say, but found he couldn’t. He looked Ren in the eye and then desperately wished he hadn’t.

His eyes were darker than Hux had ever seen them, and Hux felt a rush of feeling the same as he had at the river, when he’d seen Ren’s pale naked feet and the sun-warmed shell of his ear: seared open. Painfully exposed, gut-wrenchingly bare.

The blood of the man he’d killed was still steadily dripping from the man’s empty neck onto the stone floor of the cave, a soft, wet sound that seemed somehow _obscene_ under these new circumstances. Ren dropped down to one knee, then the other. He was kneeling in a pool of blood and Hux watched his pants soak through with it - deep, irreversible red.

“I’ll show you, then,” Ren said, softly, against the skin of Hux’s stomach where he bunched up Hux’s shirt. He pressed a kiss to Hux’s naked hip bone and Hux flinched as if he’d been struck.

Ren raised an eyebrow, looked up and -

_Christ almighty_. Kneeling in the bloody dirt like that, hands sure and warm on Hux’s hips. Eyes - unbearable. Hux swallowed heavily.

“Still afraid?” Ren said, voice soft but - loose, somehow. Less controlled. Hux shook his head. Ren leaned forward and bit the sharp bone of his hip and Hux gasped again, pounded his fist against the wall he was still leaning on. Everything was shaking: the walls of the cave, the air. The insides of Hux’s stomach, his hands.

“Couldn’t hear,” Ren said. There was a smile in his voice.

Hux said, voice shaking, “No.”

“Not afraid?”

No. Fear was nothing in the face of this. Hux’s entire world was gone, narrowed to only the grip of Ren’s fingers on his hips and the warmth of Ren’s breath across his stomach. This was annihilation, not fear.

“Not - not afraid.”

Ren untied Hux’s pants for him - his hands were so steady, so sure, and Hux was seized with a sudden rush of envy - and then pushed them down to his knees.    

 He was suddenly, painfully aware of how exposed he was: back to the cave wall, hands covered in blood while Ren knelt carelessly next to the corpse of the man he’d killed, mouth inches from Hux’s naked cock.

The feeling of Ren’s breath on him was too much. The _air_ was too much. Hux shook, and shook, and looked to the ceiling so he wouldn’t have to see at those awful dark eyes on him.

Ren spoke, and it was scarcely an inch from his cock. Hux felt himself shaking apart.

“I ain’t even touched you yet.” His voice was so dark, so satisfied with himself. Hux made a fist and banged it against the wall again.

“Shut your fool mouth, Ren, or I’ll shut it for you.”

Ren raised an eyebrow and settled back more comfortably on his knees. His mouth was still horribly close. He breathed over it again and Hux felt his whole body twitch, like a flinch but worse.

“I hope you know,” Ren said, voice dropping even further, something strangely nostalgic in it, “I aim to kill you.”

Then he took Hux’s whole cock all the way down his throat at once.

Some dusty back corner of Hux’s mind thought, _that’s one of the first things I ever said to him,_ but the rest of him was dying.

That’s what it was. Must be.

Ren was Death, he’d always known it, but he didn’t expect it to feel like -

The heat alone, the suffocating, searing heat was too much to -

Some loud, awful wounded animal sound echoed off the walls of the cave, piercing and desperate, and Ren pulled off and smiled against Hux’s hip.

“That’s high praise, Mr. Hux,” he said, lips impossibly hot and slick when he spoke against Hux’s skin.

Hux was panting too hard to respond, but looked down at Ren with the most confused expression he could manage.

Ren grinned - absolutely _vicious_ , like a coyote sinking its teeth into a rabbit - and pinched the thin white skin over Hux’s hip.

Hux jerked and a sigh escaped him without his say so.

“Didn’t expect this,” Ren said, fingers tracing excruciatingly soft lines over the head of Hux’s cock, “What with you being such a quiet man and all.”

“Fuck you,” Hux spat, so full of rage he could hardly get it out. His heart was beating so fast he wasn’t sure if he’d survive. The edges of his vision were black, like he was seconds away from unconsciousness. Ren’s tongue followed the path of his fingers and Hux felt himself choke on a sound he’d never made before in his life.

His mouth was too hot. Hux couldn’t possibly survive.

Ren was going to kill him. On his knees with his mouth over Hux’s leaking cock and his hands curled bruisingly tight on Hux’s hips, Ren was going to kill him.

Hux heaved one huge, difficult breath and said it again, furious and devastated and overwhelmed.

“Fuck you.”

“That wasn’t my initial plan,” Ren said, eyes laughing. He was so - dangerously smooth when he spoke, when he moved. Card shark. Hux had almost forgotten. “But you did just do me a mighty big favor.”

Ren nodded to the head in the bag - the _head_ , the decapitated head, and Hux’s knees almost gave out -

“So,” Ren stood abruptly and turned around, digging in the dead man’s pack, “I could be persuaded to change my course of action.”

Ren came up with a tin of something in his hand, inspected it and shrugged.

“For burns, it says,” he said, grinning again. Hux had never seen him smile so much. It was throwing him horribly off-balance. “What do you think?”

Hux’s voice returned to him once Ren was a safe distance away. “About what?”

Ren laughed. There was something different in the set of his eyes – darker than anything Hux had ever seen, darker than the night he’d spent alone in the Providence jailhouse. Ren looked predatory. Like a switch had been thrown. Like he’d been holding it back this whole time.

Very suddenly, Hux came to the realization that Ren had never been afraid of wanting him. That he’d been absolutely wrong about that.

What, then, had Ren been afraid of?

A coyote howled over the desert outside, and Hux realized the sun was going down.

“Hux.”

Hux turned, eyes landing on Ren, chill sliding down his spine at the sound of his name – still – in that voice.

Ren was on the ground, spreading out his coat so he could lay on it, untying his pants. Fear hit Hux square in the chest like an oncoming train.

“Are you gonna lay down of your own accord or do I have to lay you down myself?” Ren asked, one corner of his mouth pulling up. He was taking off his shirts, and the last time Hux had seen his bare torso like this he had nearly drowned himself.

He knelt hesitantly, almost carefully, on Ren’s coat, went to take off his pants before realizing they were already shoved down to his knees. He looked down, saw with a jolt and some mix of shock and heat that his cock was still out, still hard, and that Ren’s eyes were on it.

Hux spoke, voice splintered. “Fire,” he said. “We ought to build a fire.”

Ren’s eyes went to Hux’s knuckles, tacky and dark with blood, and a flush came to his cheeks and chest. Hux watched it spread over his throat, touch all Ren’s dark freckles, with a riveted fascination.

“We are,” Ren said, and shoved Hux onto the floor on his back.

He was reeling, felt like he was still falling, when Ren settled his knees on either side of him and leaned down, body heat suffocating despite the rapidly cooling air of the desert on his skin. Their chests were nearly touching. Hux had no idea body heat could be like this.

“Now I need to know something, Hux,” Ren said, and still, _still_ Hux shuddered at the sound of it. “Here, on this mountain, where you can’t lie –” something flashed in his eyes, something almost like guilt, and then it cleared and was gone – “I need to know.”

Hux’s eyes couldn’t stay put on one part of Ren’s face, kept going from his eyes – awful, suffocating, like warm tar – to his mouth, painfully soft and vulnerable, to his dark hair and his big, delicate ears. He looked like a coyote. They were still too close to the corpse, the blood spreading out in a big warm stain toward them.

Ren and his big ears - he was a desert animal. How had Hux never noticed that?   

“What?” Hux managed to ask, though his thoughts were bloody and hot and spinning out of control.

“You want this?”

Hux squeezed his eyes shut. Ren gripped his jaw in one huge, hot hand and leaned closer, words sinking into the skin of his lips. “Do you want this?”

He knew the answer. They both knew the answer.

“Since I set eyes on you in that godforsaken river,” Hux said, angry. Afraid. Vulnerable.

Ren kissed him then, and it almost felt like the first time again. Hux’s whole chest seized up, bubbled full and hot like he’d been shot, flooded his ribs with unfamiliarly warm blood.

Ren had shot him; Ren had killed him.

His tongue was impossible, horrible, searing where it licked at Hux’s lips, at his teeth. He’d kissed women before but it had never – he’d never –

It hadn’t been like this. He’d kept his wits, his mind, his body. This took everything from him.

His blood still buzzed with adrenaline, left over from killing Ben Solo, and he flexed his hands and felt the tacky stretch of dried blood on his skin and surged up into Ren’s mouth, hands sinking into his hair.

Ren’s breath all came out of him in a rush, and he crushed their bodies together until every part of Hux that was touching Ren was on fire: mouth, chest, belly, cock, knees.

“Do you want to do it, or should I?” Ren said against his mouth, still nearly kissing him. The words were hotter, wetter, far worse than anything anyone had ever said to Hux before.

“Do what?”

Ren laughed into Hux’s mouth. He took one of Hux’s hands – still bloody – and kissed the knuckle. His tongue touched the skin and they both groaned, whether from the blood or the heat or the jumbled combination of both it was impossible to say.

Ren pushed the tin into Hux’s other hand and Hux looked down at it. _Oh._

“I’ll show you,” Ren said, strangely comforting. Hux’s chest felt like a flag unfurling.

At the first touch of his slicked-up finger, Ren jerked and bit his own lip, and then reached back and gripped Hux’s wrist and moved it for him.

It was impossible. It was horrible. It was the hottest thing Hux had ever felt, and how in seven fucking hells was he supposed to fit –

“Fuck,” Ren panted against Hux’s neck, fingers still wrapped around Hux’s wrist behind him. He pulled until Hux’s finger was nearly free of that awful, devastating heat, and then pushed it in again. Hux groaned and Ren’s eyes rolled back in his head.

“Okay,” Ren said after a few minutes of agony, voice shaking. He finally seemed as broken as Hux felt. “Gimme another.”

He did, and this time Ren let go of Hux’s wrist to lean himself heavily onto his own arms, hovered over Hux on his knees and elbows. His whole body shook when Hux eased two fingers into him.

He learned fast.

This time he pushed his fingers in slow, almost gentle, but unrelenting. Ren made an awful sound, a broken moan that echoed off the walls of the cave and would haunt Hux until the day he died.

Ren let him figure it out for a while, stretching slowly open and relaxing against Hux with every new push of his fingers, but after a time he looked Hux in the eye and said, “Do something for me.”

_Anything_ , Hux almost said, and it was such a near thing that it shocked him. A wave of fear crashed through his chest.

Ren said, “Curl your fingers. Like this.” He made a gesture so lude Hux felt himself blush, despite their positions.

Still, he did as he was told, and Ren’s eyes were so dark Hux was certain he was going to drown, and he kept biting his lips and touching his forehead to Hux’s chest, and then after some fumbling around Ren made a noise that was _so –_

“Yes,” he said, voice higher than Hux had ever heard it, “There.”

Hux felt dizzy just watching him. His mouth fell open when Ren closed his eyes and sighed, covered in sweat, flush all the way to his nipples, impossibly hot around Hux’s fingers.

Without waiting for Ren to prompt him, Hux grabbed the tin and added a third slicked-up finger. Ren whined high in his throat, like an animal. It shocked Hux all the way to his toes.

Just because he’d never done this before didn’t mean he hadn’t put some thought to it, and he’d always been a fast study, and the blood from Ben Solo’s head was still on his hands and he wanted to see it disappear into Ren’s body, so he flipped them and slammed Ren into the ground on his back.

Ren laughed breathlessly, the same sort of carefree sound he’d made when Hux had first set eyes on him playing cards in the cantina, and it dissolved perfectly into a loud, desperate curse when Hux pushed three fingers back into him.

“Fuck – Christ almighty –”

Hux felt himself smiling the same sort of smile he always had to bite back after he did a job. It usually scared people, seeing a man smile like that after killing someone. Ren looked up at him and shivered violently, blushed deeply from his ears down the back of his neck.

Ren gripped Hux’s arm feverishly hard, knuckles turning white when Hux curled his fingers in exactly the right spot – he’d never miss it again – and said, “Come on, come on – just – just fuckin’ – shit – ”

Hux spread his fingers where they were shoved inside Ren and watched them disappear into him, Solo’s blood and all, watched Ren’s back arch off the floor, put a hand on Ren’s chest and pushed him back down. There was a heat inside his chest unlike anything he’d ever felt in his life. He was so dizzy. He felt absolutely out of control. Never had he allowed another human being to see so much of him; he had no idea the things his face was giving away.

It was a strange sort of vulnerability, knowing Ren could see exactly how much savage, violent joy Hux housed inside himself after a job. It was doubly strange to see how it affected him.

Hux curled his fingers again, pushed them in as deep as Ren’s body would have them, and watched Ren crack completely down the middle. His voice when he moaned bounced off the walls of the cave until it was all Hux could hear. The sun was set, long gone, and Hux was vaguely aware that it surely must be cold but he couldn’t feel it. His whole body was on fire.

“Fuckin’ _do_ it, you dirty fuckin’ bastard,” Ren said, voice slurred and higher than Hux expected. Hux slowly eased his fingers out and lined his cock up, but didn’t move. He set it against the edge of Ren’s hole and watched him shake, felt it twitch where his cock touched it.

“Do what?” Hux was shocked at the sound of his own voice: panting, winded like he’d run a great distance. Low and strange.

“You son of a bitch,” Ren spat, hardly a whisper. “Fuck m—”

He cut himself off with a sound Hux had never heard a man make before, except once: when Hux had been young, he’d stabbed a man from behind straight through the heart. He’d made the same sound.

Hux looked down and watched Ren’s hole swallow his cock in one long, greedy push. His ears were ringing. He could hardly hear Ren moaning. He could hardly hear himself – he knew he was whining like a wounded animal but it felt almost like it was someone else.

Ren suddenly shifted, threw his legs up around Hux’s hips and pulled him in like an inescapable tide. Hux was reminded painfully of the river, of how it had felt to look with such devastating longing at the lines of Ren’s back, of how it had felt to let the dark of the river drag him away to his death.

Ren’s eyes were the same as the black water. Inviting, deadly. Inevitable.

Hux lost his train of thought then as Ren wrapped both legs and arms around him and crushed their bodies together, sweat and skin making terrible, obscene noise, echoing through the empty cave.

He had no idea how long it went on. They didn’t speak, Hux just gasped over and over again into the skin of Ren’s neck, against his ear, his lips. They didn’t kiss so much as bite each other’s lips and breathe. Hux could see his own breath. He could see steam rising off Ren’s flushed chest in the brilliant moonlight. The blood on the floor of the cave from the murdered man, and the blood on Hux’s hands, looked black like a sin.

Finally Ren spoke.

“Touch me, please, fuck –”

Hux slowed, unable to stop the frantic pounding of his heart and the buzzing in his chest, and looked Ren in the eye.

“You know there’s blood on my hands.”

Ren seized around Hux’s cock, buried so deep inside him Hux could feel both their heartbeats. His lips parted. He nodded.

“I know.”

Hux reached between them and ran a fingertip up the length of Ren’s leaking, neglected cock. Ren’s breath left him in a mad rush. A coyote howled so close and so loud it could have been inside the cave. Hux didn’t even look up.

He pulled almost all the way out and them slammed back in, wrapped a fist around Ren’s cock and pumped it in time as he fucked him, said, “You like that there’s blood on my hands.”

Ren’s eyes crossed when Hux angled his hips. “Y-yes.”

Hux’s chest dropped, like his whole soul was evacuating his body. He wondered if God would forgive the things he’d done in his life.

“So do I,” he said, quiet, whispered against Ren’s swollen, wet lips and tongue like he was telling his darkest secret, because he was.

Ren came then, screamed himself hoarse with Hux’s cock all the way inside him and his fist bloody and warm around him, spilled all over Hux’s knuckles and Hux couldn’t have stopped himself from following even if he’d wanted to. He imagined how Ren’s come on his fingers would be stained pink from the blood still on Hux’s hands and it was like getting swept away by a current.

He nearly passed out, then flopped down onto the cave floor. There was sweat all over him.

Ren’s arms and legs were spread out flat against the stone, goosebumps already raising on his sweat-slick skin. He looked over at Hux, cheeks flushed and eyes oppressively dark, and smiled on half of his face.

“Well,” he said, voice still breathless, “that was-”

“Shut up.”

Ren laughed, low and inside his chest, and rolled to his feet. His groan when he moved made Hux blush again. Hux had the insane, childish thought that Ren was running away from him and spoke before he thought it through.

“Where are you going?”

Ren shot him a look. “I’m starting a fire,” he said, voice still low. Hux liked the way he said that. _Fahr_. Softer than the way he said it. “Surely you’ve noticed.”

Hux looked down at his naked torso in mild surprise as a shiver ran through him. The moon was so high he could see it from the cave mouth.

Ren huffed a laugh and said, “Well, you will soon.”

Hux tried not to shiver, just watched Ren work and helped him shield the sparks from the wind that carried into the cave.

Once the fire was started, and the bones of Hux’s hands started to ache from the sensation of warming up after being so cold - he hadn’t even noticed - Ren threw a blanket down next to it and pulled another on top of himself. He reached out from under it and grabbed Hux by the wrist.

“No,” Hux said, flat.

Ren pouted like a woman: big eyes and distracting lips. Hux squinted into the fire and didn’t budge, though he didn’t take his wrist from Ren’s grip.

“No,” he repeated.

Ren reached out with both hands and pulled Hux’s whole body toward him under the blankets, saying, “Just till we’re warm. That’s all.”

Hux considered that, blood still peeling in dry itchy flakes on his skin. He scratched absently at some of it over his knuckles and remembered the corpse with a jolt.

He looked over at Ben Solo’s body, at his head peeking out of the top of the bag next to it, and the wind howled over the mouth of the cave.

Hux shivered. He went under the blanket and let Ren wrap warm arms around his torso.

“This don’t mean-”

“I know,” said Ren, soft against the back of Hux’s neck. His breath was warm. Hux felt the unshed shiver that had taken up residence in his chest easing. “Just till we’re warm.”

Hux made himself comfortable, aware of how dangerous, how good Ren’s body felt against his back. He burrowed in a little closer, telling himself it was for the cold, and Ren’s arms tightened around him.

They were silent for a time, Hux’s eyes on the wide silver moon that lit up the cave floor like water. He thought Ren was asleep until Ren spoke, soft, against the shell of his ear and the side of his neck.

“Hux,” he said, and Hux shivered. He’d never be rid of that - the intimacy of his name.

“What.”

“Do you think - do you think it’s - we should -”

Hux nearly turned around but didn’t want to face Ren in such a small, warm space. It seemed too quiet, too personal. Instead he shifted so his shoulders sank into Ren’s chest and dug under his armpits and said, “Speak plain now, Kylo.”

Ren paused, and it occurred to Hux that he’d never used his first name before. It felt even worse than he’d imagined. He felt a compulsion to speak it again, as if it was pulling some part of Ren to the surface, some part he desperately needed to see.

He thought of going fishing with his father - one of his only memories of the man that wasn’t bloody - and remembered the feeling of pulling a line up from the deep black river, heavy and squirming. In the seconds before it broke through the water, he’d had no idea what was under there - a shark, a catfish, a tangle of line - and had felt a strange rush of exhilarated fear, knowing he was pulling something to the top that could have killed him, or could have been only air.

He felt that same rush now.

“Kylo,” he said again, lower, and Ren shivered around him. “Talk or don’t.”

Ren’s voice was so soft and so warm it was almost wet against Hux’s ear.

“Should we get rid of him?”

“Who?”

Ren’s chin nodded, Hux felt it against the back of his neck, and then he remembered Ben Solo.

“He ain’t goin nowhere,” Hux said.

“But -” Ren cut himself off. The wind howled horribly outside, but the fire was warm and orange and Ren’s body heat was the hottest thing Hux had ever felt. Ren’s hands shook where they held Hux against his chest.

“But,” Ren tried again, voice so unsure it was almost afraid, “his soul. It can’t get out.”

Hux turned in his arms then, unable to stop himself. Ren’s eyes were huge, wet, black in the moonlight.

“His soul,” Hux said, disbelieving.

Ren nodded, eyes sliding off Hux’s face almost shamefully. “It’s trapped,” he said.

Hux laughed.

“You just spent all the money you had,” and at this Hux glanced down at Ren’s cock and felt Ren shiver again, “at this man’s blood on my hands when I touched you. And you’re worried about his soul?”

Ren wrapped his arms around Hux again, pulled him far too close. He nodded, looking strangely guilty. They were nearly nose to nose. Hux hated it, how close they were. Ren’s eyes felt inescapable this way.

Still, he didn’t move. He said, “Ren, are you afraid of him?”

There were freckles on Ren’s face, softer and lighter than the huge dark constellations Hux had first noticed. They made him look smaller, somehow.

Ren’s eyes didn’t leave Solo’s body. For quite some time he didn’t speak, and Hux was left to look at his face lit up by the moon.

“Yes,” Ren finally said in a soft voice, “I am afraid.”

“How do you know Solo?”

Ren started violently, eyes snapping to Hux’s face in abject shock and fear before fanning out into something softer. “Know what?”

“How do you know him?”

“Oh.” Ren’s eyes slid away again, reflecting the moon like mercury. “Solo?”

“I just said that. Unless I killed the wrong man.”

He’d wanted to see Ren laugh again, curious about how it would break his chest to see it up close, but Ren’s entire body froze solid for a second and then melted again as if nothing had happened. He ignored Hux’s comment completely.

“I know him from a time,” Ren said, and Hux huffed in frustration. “Seems like a whole life ago.”

“Do you know why I had to use that particular bullet?” Hux asked.

Ren’s face did something strange, something that made Hux feel he was looking at a cracked-open fruit or the underside of a leaf: too soft, too vulnerable. It made Hux’s toes curl to set his eyes on it.

“Snoke, I expect,” said Ren after a beat. “Had a group of men. Rode through towns on horseback. Pillaged and the like.”

Hux nodded, and their faces were so close his nose touched Ren’s cheek when he did it. Something horribly warm and alive shocked down the back of Hux’s legs at the feeling.

“I heard of em,” Hux said. Something twisted wryly on Ren’s face. “Nights.”

“Knights, like for a king,” Ren corrected him. “Killed indiscriminately. You know what-”

“I know what indiscriminately means, Kylo,” Hux said, bristling. “I ain’t a goddamn idiot.”

“No, it’s just - you talk like -” Ren stopped, looked down and then back up again.

Hux narrowed his eyes. “Go on, now,” he said, like he was telling Ren to take a step off a bridge. “I talk like what?”

“Like a poor man.”

Hux felt his mouth curl up. “The desert’s a place for poor men, Ren. Broken things belong here.” He looked up at Ren’s eyes again, where before he’d been fixed on his throat in the silver light. “The oddity here ain’t me,” he said.

Ren looked away.

Hux said, “Indiscriminately.”

Ren seemed lost in thought and spoke softly, almost to himself, “Yeah. Indiscriminately. Had that symbol on your bullet on their jackets. Over their hearts.”

Hux grunted.

“Solo was one of them,” Ren said, and he shifted Hux around again so he wasn’t facing him anymore. “Killed a lot.”

Hux looked at the moon, then at the fire. Strange, how different they were.

“I killed a lot. You want me dead too?”

Ren huffed into the back of Hux’s neck and it was warm and strangely personal.

“Snoke tricked him into killing - someone he -” Ren cleared his throat. “Solo killed his father, blamed the Knights for it.”

“And?”

“And then he hunted them all down and killed them one by one.”

Hux closed his eyes and the fire stood out blue and alive under his eyelids. “Ah.”

Ren hummed against the back of his neck and touched his nose to Hux’s ear.

“Personal, then,” Hux said.

“Mm.”

“For you?”

“Mm.”

He wanted to know how Ren fit into this. But to pry was to admit that he cared to know, and he wouldn’t do that.

It was desperately cold this side of the mountain, and even past the fire it bit at Hux through the blankets. He hated being like this - he could feel the searing heat of Ren’s body against him, Ren’s cock oppressively hot on the small of his back, Ren’s breath too personal on the shell of his ear. He knew he should move, but he didn’t.

He started to fall asleep, then he said at the last minute, “I killed my father too.”

Ren didn’t respond, and Hux felt himself slipping into sleep with Ren’s arms hotter than the fire around him, and the trapped soul of Ben Solo like a ghost in the cave. 

 


End file.
